|~|educationpicone200.jpg|~|Karim: Today’s students want a more flexible learning experience.|~|When it comes to enabling education through IT, parts of the Middle East are near the top of the class. But there are some educational institutes that still need to learn a few lessons when it comes to using new technology to create best value for their students. The way in which education is delivered to students has changed significantly in recent years, and the days of chalk boards and dusty libraries may be coming to an end if the example of the British University in Dubai (BUiD) is anything to go by.
The university teaches courses based on material supplied by several UK centres of learning, and recently launched a Masters in IT management based on material from Edinburgh and Manchester Universities. This has required BUiD to use state-of-the-art technology to ensure that its students are able to share the same academic experience as their UK counterparts.
Dr Habib Talhami is head of the institute of informatics, BUiD. “Before even embarking on this we thought that we would have to offer our students the opportunity of sitting in on lectures in Edinburgh and Manchester,” says Talhami. “For research, you need to be physically there in some form to understand what is being explained, ask questions, to do this interaction.”
The time and expense of travelling back and forth to the UK would have been unmanageable, so BUiD came up with the idea of ‘videowalling’, whereby its students watch a live broadcast of a lecture from the UK and can interact with the speaker, giving them the same experience as students who are attending the lecture in person.
“I think that’s where video conferencing can be used effectively in this environment, and certainly for this programme where we want to have guest lecturers talk about intellectual property,” says Talhami. “It’s very hard to find people with experience of intellectual property in this part of the world, but it’s something that’s been developing over the years in Edinburgh and therefore you will get an expert to give a talk within that programme through video conferencing.”
As well as attending lessons remotely, the university also allows its students to access written course content, such as lecture notes, through Blackboard, a web-based programme, wherever they are in the world, and even to submit coursework through the same facility. “It also has also virtual classrooms,” he says. “Students are able to communicate with each other and with the lecturer.
“More importantly, something that we have been using is submission of coursework. They can work on their assignment remotely and submit it through Blackboard. There is a deadline and if they don’t submit in time, that facility is turned off – they cannot submit or they’re penalised, it’s all set up automatically.”
The university also conducts some of its exams electronically, but there are some technical issues holding back full adoption. “The exams at the moment are mixed. They’re paper-based as well as digital, but I expect in the near future we will move totally to a digital environment,” says Talhami. ||**|||~|DR.TALH200low.jpg|~|Dr Talhami: BUiD is using videowalling to bring UK experts to its students’ deployments.|~|”There are technical challenges with regards to the marking of questions. You can do multiple choice, you can do numerical ones, but how do you mark an essay automatically?” The university is doing its own research in this area, and Talhami believes that it is a problem that can be solved. “This is a technology that will be coming,” he says.
Using bandwidth-hungry services like video conferencing and hosting so much course material online means that modern universities have high demands on their networks.
And schools are also seeing bandwidth demands increasing and are starting to make sure they have the right infrastructure in place for the classroom of the future. In fact, some, such as the Wellington International School in Dubai, has put in core infrastructure that most enterprises are only dreaming of.
As part of a solution to provide an ‘any time, any where’ wireless IT infrastructure, the school has implemented a 10G backbone network, delivering Gigabit connectivity to the desktop. With this, Wellington becomes the first school in the Middle East with such a facility. In addition to a ProCurve wireless solution, students have on demand access, based on the user’s profile. ProCurve’s Adaptive EDGE Architecture can scale and adapt to future needs of the school as well as optimise returns on any current infrastructure investments.
Mathew Boice, general manager for Sungard Higher Education in the Middle East says: “The demands on the infrastructure are significant now. Many universities have not experienced a need to provide 24/7 services before and then when they’re looking at their infrastructure they’re finding that it’s not reliable enough, or it’s not scaleable enough, or that it’s tuned around operating in office hours and actually students want to log in from their homes in the early hours and interact online.”
Sungard has developed a framework called the unified digital campus. This allows colleges and universities to unify their services and deliver them more efficiently to their users, particularly students, who have high expectations today. “In terms of the way students are expecting to be served, they want the administration and the interaction with the learning environment to be seamless,” Boice explains.
“Traditionally, those things would have been regarded as back office services. They would have required the students to physically visit various offices to go to pay their bills, to find their grades, to get a transcript. The expectation now is that those things will be available in exactly the same environment they’re going to take their classes in or interact with library resources.”
He believes that universities have become far more professional in the way they run their IT systems. You’re seeing much more enterprise-like behaviour that you would recognise from experience in other vertical market areas.”
Rob Sparks, solutions director for Sungard Higher Education Middle East, says that there are key differences between IT management in universities compared to other industries. “What is unique about universities in terms of how IT helps them as opposed to other verticals is that the content that’s managed on the web isn’t necessarily centrally administered. Typically in a corporate area there is a single area where the contributions are supported and maintained. In universities, that content is really quite decentralised so staff in the alumni relations office can make contributions, even staff in the registrar’s office, admissions, facilities or the purchasing department.”||**|||~|edu-sungard200.jpg|~|Boice: Universities now need to provide 24/7 services for their users.|~|Managing new content and extra services requires new solutions. Al Ahlia University in Bahrain recently implemented a library management system from Edutech, which will also provide cataloguing services and a high end security system to protect its information resources. The university used Virtua SLE, an integrated solution enabling it to save time and effort on purchasing and configuring hardware, database and application components.
A.S.F. Karim, managing director of Edutech, says that the demand for new technology in education has been driven by a new generation of students who want flexible learning solutions and a more visual experience. “At present, mission critical applications such as online learning delivery platforms, integration between administration and academic systems and content development tools are products that are most in demand,” said Karim.
“However, in future we anticipate a major demand for products pertaining to online testing and assessments, learning objectives measurement systems, ePortfolios to build lifelong learning experiences, and systems that help students organise their course materials and improve the efficiency and effectiveness for review in preparation for tests.”
But there are some who believe that not all of the investments in technology are being made wisely. “Money is not an issue [in the GCC],” says Fadi Abdul Khalek, CEO of Universal Knowledge Solutions (UKS). “You will see a lot of decoration in the classroom, but proper utilisation is minimal.”
One area where technology can give proven benefits is in improving access to education. UKS recently helped to set up the Syrian Virtual University, which uses specially constructed computer labs in several locations, which students use to study and take exams online, without having to go to a central campus.
“There are only four state universities and more than half of students don’t get a place in university,” explains Rouba Abouzeid, marketing director, UKS. “In remote areas it can take six hours to travel to university. This scheme helps minimise expenses.”
Having decided to study IT, students need to be sure that their courses equip them with the skills they will need in a career. The BUiD is trying to improve the content of its courses for the IT graduates of the future. It will launch a new course in September aimed at equipping IT graduates with the project management skills they will need in their career.
Dr Talhami says: “If someone graduates with a degree in IT and you plug that person into any company, even a university, that person has to have project management skills. It has to be inbuilt because everything you do is a project and every project must have a beginning, a budget, a timeline and deliverables.”||**|||~|edu-astf-bright200.jpg|~|Nasir and Dr Alnajjar: Arab IT students will compete internationally.|~|As well as offering training in project management, the course has a module on people and culture, to make students aware of the issues they will come across while working in a multicultural society.
Vendors are also keen to contribute to IT in the education sector, perhaps to ensure that they have a supply of suitably-skilled graduates to call on in the future. The Arab Science & Technology Foundation (ASTF) has been helping IT students market the products of their research better through the Arab Universities Technology Business Plan Competition, in conjunction with Intel. This is the first pan-Arab competition for business plans in the technology sector for educational institutes. The winners will go to the University of California, Berkeley, to compete for the first time with other regional winners for the world title. “We want to try to bring some real life to this region and make a culture change in our approach to science and technology,” said Dr Abdulla A. Alnajjar, ASTF president.
Intel supports the competition as part of its Digital Transformation and World Ahead schemes. “We want to give students the depth of knowledge to be able to compete worldwide,” says Bassem Nasir, Intel Higher Education manager Middle East. “We realised that a lot of students were coming out of universities that were very technically skilled but lacked the competence in marketing their skills.”
In Saudi Arabia, Sun Microsystems has invested in driving skills development with an investment at the King Abdulaziz University (KAU) in Jeddah. The vendor will work towards the development of a Sun Centre of Excellence to create egovernment applications based on its platform. Students will have access to over 130 online training programmes through the initiative and will be able to earn certification.
“Being one of the premier academic institutes in Saudi Arabia, it has been our endeavour to equip our students with the best in education so that our students are equipped to face the challenges of the work place once they step into the real world,” says Abdulrahman bin Obaid Al-Yubi, vice chancellor of KAU. “We are working closely with Sun to look at ways to ensure our students are abreast with the latest innovation and development taking place globally.”
Despite all this technology, there will still be a need for the human element in education. “It’s very hard to imagine what will happen 10 years from now, but certainly what you will have is less and less of the physical presence and the classroom. Whether it goes down to zero, I’m not too sure. There seems to be a need for physical interaction. There will still be a need for people like me,” says BUiD’s Dr Talhami.||**||Technology investments clear road for successful schools of the future|~||~||~|John Gomes, educational consultant, Road Ahead Group (RAG), a leading provider in interactive technologies based out of Dubai Knowledge Village, believes that the technology in the best schools today outdoes universities. “It’s amazing to see the amount of infrastructure that they have made,” he says. “Colleges don’t have the facilities that schools have nowadays.”
The medium of instruction has changed in many schools, with interactive white boards from GTCO Calcomp and subject-specific software from RM allowing teachers to demonstrate concepts that might otherwise be hard to explain: for example, graphs can react to a moving image of a pendulum, showing how its kinetic and potential energy changes at different points as it swings, and how these are altered by changing its weight or length.
The interactive white boards have found a warm reception in both classroom teaching and corporate training. They come in two varieties: hard surface, which reacts to an electronic ‘pen’, and touch-sensitive surface, which reacts to pressure exerted either by finger or a stylus. Both convert the teacher’s handwriting into an easy-to-read font and, in a further step for accessibility, the programme can also read aloud any word on the screen.
“Teachers love it because it makes their lives easier,” says Gomes. “They can then print off copies. There is no more sitting down at home on the laptop creating lessons.”
Exams are also enlivened thanks to handheld ‘clickers’ that allow students to send in their answers by pressing a button, much like a TV audience. As well as speeding up the examination process, the system also allows results to be produced as soon as the questions have been completed. Although the system is mainly used for multiple-choice exams, a new model of the Interwrite PRS allows students to submit written answers using an LCD screen and RF mode.
One of RAG’s newest products, Zenguard, can be used in other industries. It is a behaviour management programme designed to spot children using the school network to bully their classmates or otherwise behave inappropriately. An administrator can set a watchlist of prohibited words and be alerted whenever one is sent by a user in any MS Office application, including MSN Messenger. He can then choose to warn the user to change their behaviour or monitor them in stealth mode.
“This software has even greater use in industries that deal with sensitive information, such as in R&D,” says Faisal Bhojani, business development officer, RAG.
However it is not always the children who misuse school systems. “In one school, teachers were playing the stock market during school hours,” Gomes says.||**||
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